The Departed (Two-Disc Special Edition)

Scorsese sets himself up for Oscar glory with this great throwback to his Goodfellas days. Check out our advance DVD review.

There's a strong impulse to embrace Martin Scorsese's latest movie The Departed just because it revisits territory that he practically mapped himself. The director's recent ventures into period pieces and biopics have felt more like experiments or digressions; this, on the other hand, rings truer to the oeuvre that established him as a singular cinematic voice. That said, there's a big part of that vision that feels uncontainable, as if Scorsese can't quite be pegged no matter how many times he returns to the same well.

All of which is why The Departed is at once a crowning achievement in crime cinema, and a slight letdown for a career iconoclast: Scorsese has produced another masterpiece more on par with previous works like Casino and Cape Fear than Goodfellas or Raging Bull. In other words, the director follows two personal projects with a more conventional but no less engaging piece of populist entertainment -- in so doing restoring his well-earned reputation as both an earner and artist, but failing to genuinely expand his creative accomplishments beyond those he already achieved.

Based on the 2002 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, The Departed stars Leonardo DiCaprio (The Aviator) and Matt Damon (Syriana) as a cop and a crook who infiltrate each other's organizations at the behest of their scenery-chewing superiors. For DiCaprio's Billy Costigan, it's Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Dignam (Mark Wahlberg), a police Captain and Sergeant respectively who want to harness the young man's conflicted impulse to do good; meanwhile, Damon's Colin Sullivan answers to Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), an 800-lb. gorilla of a mob boss who owns the streets of Boston much to the consternation of the cops.

Before long, the two men are locked in a battle of wills to uncover their counterpart, with the livelihood of their bosses (and ultimately, their own lives) at stake. In the meantime, both men unknowingly become involved with the same woman - a police psychiatrist named Madolyn (Vera Farmiga) - who not only maintains their tenuous connection as cop and crook, but somehow holds the secrets of their equally damaged psyches.

Scorsese's facility with this kind of material is that of a concert pianist playing "Chopsticks;" he unfolds the twists and turns embedded in William Monahan's script so easily you're almost disappointed there's nothing more challenging lurking beneath them. But like Ocean's Eleven or even this summer's Mission: Impossible III, there's something to be said for an expert rendition of a familiar tune; and while the genre has all but rendered itself irrelevant via psychological thriller scenarios and all-around disappointing entries like Sleepers or The Devil's Own, the director's cast and crew are more than up for the challenge of breathing new life into a familiar formula.

While it's tough to determine whether Damon's glib rendition of Sullivan is a result of Scorsese's direction or just his interpretation of the character, the entire cast does an incredible job making this entanglement of double and triple-crosses not only seem believable but compelling: DiCaprio's tortured Costigan seems complicit in his undercover crimes as much because of personal conflict as professional compulsion; Damon's slick self-assuredness belies some deep-seated doubt, and eventually, indecision about where his allegiance lies; Sheen's Quennan becomes the good-cop father-figure go-between as a counterpoint to Wahlberg's bombastic instigator; and Nicholson simply seems like he's having a good time reminding his fellow actors, and by extension the audience, what it looks like when a master thespian is let loose to play the blue notes in an otherwise black-and-white composition.

While the film appears to be largely a boys' club both within the ensemble and for potential audiences, special note must be made of Vera Famiga, who recently played Paul Walker's wife in Wayne Kramer's Running Scared. The actress also won a Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Best Actress for her performance in the little-seen Down To the Bone, but one expects few things she does going forward will share that same description: Playing "the girl" who comes between the movie's two leads, Farmiga transforms an imminently familiar subplot into something surprisingly complex, joining the ranks of actresses like Cate Blanchett and Kate Winslet who can elevate even the smallest role to something substantial.

Ultimately, however, this film is the director's show, and he runs with it without falling back too often on visual cues or other ideas that have since become boilerplate Scorsese (in other words, few long tracking shots or exuberant slo-mo sequences). But is a remake, even one this well-executed, the sort of thing we really want to see from this filmmaker? This is a guy who has ventured almost literally to outer Mongolia and back, and has given birth to as many cinematic legends as any living director; as the film for which he seems most likely to win that elusive Academy Award, most diehard fans would prefer something a little more heartfelt, or at the very least more evocative of the adventurous spirit that generated so many earlier masterpieces (even the flawed ones).

Taken as a single-serving film, however, The Departed is nothing short of brilliant -- complicated, ambiguous and ambitious, executed with a virtuosity shared only by a handful of other American filmmakers. (In fact, one of them -- Clint Eastwood -- will likely be his main competition when Oscars are handed out in March.) Scorsese is and hopefully will always be a great director; so while many will mark this as a return to form or a new apex in his filmography, IGN prefers to think of it as one last hurrah for the kinds of movies he used to make -- a grand finale in his canon of crime movies. In other words, The Departed will hopefully be best remembered not only as a requiem, but a rebirth for the man whose films raised the bar for filmmakers everywhere.